Soil & Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith with Fred Bahnson

2021 Faith Matters Series

How does food impact your spiritual journey? How does the garden serve as a metaphor — throughout scripture, and in our everyday life?

Join Executive Director Wendy Goldberg as she facilitates this Faith Matters conversation with:

• Fred Bahnson, author of Soil & Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith
• Ilene Arnold, Temple Israel member and Tri-Faith Garden volunteer leader
• Ann Naylor, Countryside Community Church member and Tri-Faith Garden volunteer leader

ABOUT FRED BAHNSON
Fred Bahnson is the author of Soil & Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith. “This book is profoundly, beautifully down to earth,” wrote Bill McKibben, “which is almost certainly where we all need to spend more time on a planet in crisis.” Part narrative journalism, part spiritual autobiography, the book follows Fred’s journey into the spirituality of food and farming. Along the way he grows mushrooms with Trappist monks, catches a buzz with Pentecostal coffee roasters, and celebrates Sukkot on a Jewish farm. In its starred review Kirkus Reviews wrote, “Bahnson’s lively prose is spiritual without ever being preachy or heavy-handed, and the overall effect is akin to reading a Wendell Berry essay, if Berry also had a sense of humor.”

Fred’s essays and journalism appear in Harper’s, Oxford American, Orion, Notre Dame Magazine, Emergence, Image, The Sun, and Best American Spiritual Writing. His essay “On the Road with Thomas Merton” won a 2020 Wilbur Award for Best Magazine Article from the Religion Communicators Council and was selected by acclaimed nature writer Robert MacFarlane for the anthology Best American Travel Writing 2020. His awards include a Pilgrimage Essay Award, a W.K. Kellogg Food & Society Policy fellowship, and a North Carolina Artist fellowship in creative nonfiction from the NC Arts Council. Fred has given keynotes at Yale, Duke, Georgetown, TEDx Manhattan’s “Changing the Way We Eat,” and most recently at the 2019 Halki Summit in Istanbul, where he spoke on faith and climate change for an international gathering of environmental leaders convened by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. He lives with his wife and sons in southwest Montana.

Tri-Faith Initiative events are recorded and archived on our YouTube Channel.